


Romance, in Quartet

by Pie (potteresque_ire)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Harry Potter Next Generation, Healer Harry Potter, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Writer Draco Malfoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 05:46:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1376098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potteresque_ire/pseuds/Pie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a human need to tell stories, as it is to live, to love. As his cancer-stricken son battled death, Draco, the writer of WWN's <i>The Romance Hour</i>, found solace in his quill. Little did he know this romance, written over endless cups of coffee, would star himself and Scorpius’ Healer, Harry Potter. Remix of <i>Coffee Talks</i> by Queenie_Mab.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Romance, in Quartet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Queenie_Mab](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queenie_Mab/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Coffee Talks](https://archiveofourown.org/works/455565) by [Queenie_Mab](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queenie_Mab/pseuds/Queenie_Mab). 



> Written for 2014 hd_remix. This story recounts and expands upon, in Draco's perspective, the happenings of Coffee Talks, which I recommend reading first.

 

 

### DESPAIR

 

#####  **Opening I**

This isn’t the first story I’ll write.

Far from it. My stories have already burned many a chicken, ruined enough stew to flood England, and, if rumours are to be believed, caused a divorce or three. I’m proud of that. Nathaira Fe is my _nom de vox_ – I’m the ghostwriter for _The Romance Hour_ , the 6 pm broadcast on WWN.

Of course, ghosts are far from invisible, as every Hogwarts alumni can attest, whereas no one knows about me, except I and possibly my owls who leave the manuscripts in the station’s Public Owlery box.

The network isn’t keen on finding out who I am. Anonymous, by Wizarding Laws, gets no payroll accounts.

 _Fine_ , you’d say. _This must be the first story about you._

And I’d laugh. I’d laugh so hard that you’d throw your coffee at my face and stomp away.

I am Draco Malfoy. Yes, _the_ Draco Malfoy whose stories as a schoolboy were exposed when the Wizengamot un-censored all documents related to the war on it’s 10 th year anniversary, such that Britain would never forget the atrocities brought about by a madman, by cowardice, by greed for power… so on, so forth. No, those mummies in funny robes were not thinking about me. I just happened to play a cameo here and there.

I’m not sure whether Britain got the memory jolt. What I’m sure is that just when I could finally walk down Diagon Alley in peace again, Britain remembered how to spit and hex. Aims as impressive as before.

So I sent myself into exile once more, in the old manor house, on top of the knoll in the largest piece of Unplottable land in Wiltshire. My family home, one can say, but my father sold its key to his boss. Not the physical key, but the one that would unlock … the whatever I felt as a child, running in the orchard at dawn, ducking the branches hung low with apples as I gave chase to the peacocks who’d stolen my picks.

But it’s a decent place to stay. I live there with my son, Scorpius.

I’d call him my heart and soul, but _Draco Malfoy’s heart and soul_ are hardly things to call anyone.

I have a trio of house-elves. Dipsy specializes in midwifery and childcare. A Greengrass. Tipsy and Wipsy are his twin daughters, born in the Manor. Teenagers in elf years, which means I never see them. But they all have names, so they all have payrolls.

I had a wife.

This is, however, the first story written about me, by myself. Pathetic start, isn’t it, and I doubt it’ll ever get finished. But I despise the stare of a blank parchment, despise my missing a deadline imposed by no one and on my birthday, no less. To beat a writer’s block, common wisdom says, one should write about something else.

This is my quest to get something down, never mind that it is about myself.

My more urgent quest is to sleep, but I know failure.

Failure is my life-long romance.

 

#####  ** Opening II **

The opening of every story requires a time, a place.

Time: 4:07 am, June 5th, 2017.  
Place: Visitor’s tea room, 5th floor, St Mungo’s Hospital

There is only one way a start like this could play out on _The Romance Hour_. Host says his trivialities. Seven seconds of silence. Story begins. Hushed whispers creep upon the scene, tones low and harried. Sobs. Crisp pings of cups against saucers, spoons against cups. A long, isolated scrape of chair leg against the floor.

Reality is far from that. I’m the only person here, silence for company. The coffee stand is open but deserted.

If I must make noise… I do have the right chair, stainless steel, missing two and a half of its four rubber feet. The window on my left is locked by a weather charm and useless, but the table – your standard coffee-stained, peeled plastic cover variety – is rickety enough that if I shake it, the sugar bowl will topple over. So will the coffee in its gloriously cheap paper cup.

As for the pamphlet, I can’t say. Static would have kept it there when it was new. But it’s dog-eared. Ripped in a way only repeated soaks can manage.

Medium: salt water.

Maybe I can read the pamphlet. Recite it out loud, like a poem, because I can.

_Your Loved One has VSP: What You Should Know._

_Vitia Sanguinis Puri (VSP), commonly known as pureblood cancer, is a rare disorder affecting individuals with MGE histologies…_

Maybe I can talk about the Healer on the cover and the fake smile plastered on his face. I’ve seen none of that on the Healers who’ve asked me to wait, day after night after day, for them to confirm my son’s diagnosis. What I’ve seen are tongues tied and near-swallowed as they say, without saying, that the common name is exactly what they mean and what a Malfoy deserve.

Better yet, I can comment on how the child, so peacefully asleep, looks nothing like Scorpius, who’s too yellow and too pale and too purple, whose cheeks are sunken in his fitful naps and swollen when he wakes, who shivers and sweats and vomits and cries because he’s so famished.

Best, I can play-act the father, frowning so prettily in his politically correct Muggle khakis and wool jacket. I can play-act the father who wants his son back, his son who, just like himself, loves to roam the orchard at dawn. My son who thinks his parents do not know, who comes to breakfast with twigs in his hair and watches his father drink his morning juice, wide-eyed, wondering if his father knows he picked the apples and he’s sure, so sure, that this time the apples will be sweet. My son who doesn't know that for centuries the orchards in his home has never managed to grow a single sweet fruit, only large, perfect-looking ones year round, even after his grandmother re-cultivated the whole orchard with a different species after a certain house guest had left the Magnum Bonum trees in ashes.

I can play-act the father who will trade anything for one more glass of sour juice. I can play-act the father who has since made do with the disgusting mudwater he’s drinking, because the sleepless nights exhaust him, and because he’s free to leave out the sugar, which belongs to the sweet apple that he, too, is still waiting for.

I can play…

 

#####  ** Opening III **

4:45am. Same place.

I refuse to start my stories with snot and tears even if, no doubt, my life started with them. They belong to the late third act, early fourth if I must.

Sometimes, I wonder who the audience of _The Romance Hour_ is – if they’re a pile of flobberworm Animagi playing humans sans Ministry registration. They’re really listening, burning dinners and crying over the same plot over night. The time is different, the place, maybe, the people’s names. What they wear and how they talk. But it’s the same story arc over and over again.

Despair. Guilt. Then Courage. Then Love.

Despair, the tried and true damsel in distress. Guilt, the finest baggage stuffed with toiletries and a bottle of Firewhiskey or three. But I place snot and tears in Courage because that’s where I want them to be, in a thing I need not worry about having. Also, this: people who cry in the open, in my mind, are incapable of hitting rock bottom. It’s those who must swallow their tears, or cry alone, who sink the deepest.

I learned that during the war. From myself. From my parents, who cried in secret but with and for one another. From my godfather, who I doubt had any tear ducts left when the snake bit him.

I mentioned Scorpius crying in _Opening II_. I… coaxed him. A Malfoy through and through, for weeks he struggled to sit up on his bed and tried to persuade Dipsy, then me, that he’d come down with nothing but a flu. Eventually I have carried him to my bed to rest. Eventually I've fed him, then I've washed and dressed him, then I have stayed up and watched him all night just so he never has had a chance to cry alone.

And cried he has, since.

Whereas I ... if I want to cry I go to a tea room, take the window seat and read the bloody pamphlet. Works in flying colours.

With that said, I want this scene to open my story. I’m not sure if it means my theory has its merits, or my wishful thinking is exactly that. But since I’ve already over-shared, it feels like the appropriate, final _Mjolnir_ against my writer’s block, this un-cooperating leaf of empty parchment.

All I need is the clock to turn back five hours. I was where I am now. Same robe. Same seat. Same stale coffee in front of me, in a ceramic mug with my surname spelled on the rim, courtesy of St Mungo’s for visitors it suspects will stay around for a while. And of course, the bloody pamphlet.

"Sunset at Maldives," said the small caption floating on the window sill as I stared out of the glass. "Weather Charm automatic shutdown in 3, 2, 1..."

 _Click_. The cuckoo in the wall clock made its stage entry and sang. Once. Twice… Twelve times. “Midnight, June 5 th!” announced the lady shepherd by the cuckoo's side, nauseatingly bright for a tenant of a sick house.

But it did force my attention back to the tea room. I realised then it was my birthday. All thoughts in my head rushed to squeeze out the best, all-encompassing birthday wish I could make, with no room for Fates to bargain with or cheat.

 _I want Scorpius to live._  
_I want Scorpius to live without suffering, without handicap._  
_I want Scorpius to live with dignity and joy._  
_I want Scorpius by my side, where he is loved and cherished._  
_I want Scorpius to board the Hogwarts Express on September 1 st._  
_I want Scorpius to board the train exactly the way he would have if he’d never got ill…_

Panic washed over. My senses went into overdrive. Silence boomed around me. The coffee I just finished burned my lungs. As the white walls seized my vision, the claws of my consciousness reached and grasped for anything they could hold and make sense of.

They caught something. My brain screeched to a halt. They caught this simple, ridiculous… this:

_I want Scorpius to find a saviour, for him, for myself._

Nothing more. My brain shrank back to its burnt-out, lethargic state and collapsed on the metaphysical plane where… burnt-out, lethargic minds went to collapse.

My physical self collapsed into its chair and returned to staring at the window. Something inside me was in stitches.

Saviour. It’s not like the Malfoys have not been graced with the presence of one. If the delivery of Saviours were based on past experience ( _please fill with aquamarine ink: 1. Charge is grateful and obedient. Extremely satisfied. 2. Charge spotted rolling his eyes, but is obedient overall. Satisfied. 3. Charge scoffs and laughs in my face, is occasionally obedient…_ ), I’d probably get my next Saviour in seven lifetimes, if not more.

I fell into a trance. Self-pity, anguish… I rivalled a Slughorn potions cabinet, as sad and as ludicrous. Then came a loud scrape of chair, exactly like the stock sound you’d hear in any indoor scene in _The Romance Hour_.

I looked up.

As it turned out, my Saviour Number One was not done with me yet. He blinked at me, re-ignited that something inside me that could break into something far less dignified than laughing, something suspiciously like… a conga. My eyes fell from the black messy hair to the spectacles and the awkward stare behind them, to the lime-green Healer robe that fit right with the atrocious wardrobe of his past.

If I must offer a proper (dignified) explanation, this is what I’d say – it felt like I’d come across a storybook I’d forgotten long ago. I lifted the bookmark and when I scanned the page, I remembered, somehow, exactly where, when and how I’d left its world.

“Potter. What do you want?” I read the next sentence of the story text. It was familiar. It was good.

He asked if I was all right. I replied, like I’d prepared all these years for it, with the old diatribe about his sainthood and hero complex, his bejewelled bottom and its cosmic emissions. With that and his snort in response – amused, dare I say – I returned to the world where saviours were real.

It was then my inner voice, still breathless from its shenanigans, whispered,

"Happy Birthday, Draco Malfoy."

  
  
  


 

 

### GUILT

 

Knights in Shining Armour are things of the past.

Even the flobberworms know: a shining armour has no chinks in it, and no hero becomes one without taking a blow or many on his breastplate. A Knight in Shining Armour belongs to fair grounds, not battlefields.

These days, they want their heroes with enough baggage to overload a Portkey and no Undetectable Extension Charms to hide them. La pièce de résistance?

Guilt.

Guilt comes in many flavours, but a hero’s guilt, like braised snidgets, is a delicacy best served flambéed. He once failed someone who’d loved him; someone who is – preferably was – nonetheless not important enough to have her own scene and tell her own story. For a hero is no longer one when his guilt is more real than he is.

And heroes are bastards between fantasy and reality from the start.

 

 

*

I’d love to count the Howlers addressed to the network if I write Potter as the leading man in _The Romance Hour_ , with a made-up name, of course, and some humbug tales of equivalent heroic value for background.

Say, if I start the story now, at this moment, with what I see.

This is the twelfth night we have spent here, in the Records Room, to review past VSP cases, to compile a list of what had failed for treatment – so that we have a new one to compare against the twenty plus lists Potter has already made in the last three years.

 _You’re my fresh eyes_ , he told me.

 _Blind eyes_ , I corrected him. Healers’ terminologies were runes to me, so is their scrawl. Worst, I’ve lost my sleep, my reason, my sense. Nothing is fresh inside me except the never-ending cups of coffee.

Healing, he said, is mostly instincts.

Under this parchment is an Application for Healer Training, disguised as case files like the many on the table. I found it when I expanded the room on Day 3, and have just finished reading every scroll, every word. I don’t know how right Potter is about most of Healing; I’m certainly not blessed with whatever _instincts_ it takes. But I can tell you what the rest of Healing is.

It is Guilt.

 

##### I

Time: 10:59 pm, night of summer solstice  
Place: The Land of Dust and Scrolls – Records Room, Attic, St Mungo’s Hospital

Potter is, for once, free of that hideous Healer robe. His jeans are tight-fitting by his standards – they must be from his Auror days, or from the months after he’d lost his wife, when his emaciation made daily headlines. Grey oxford shirt. Sleeves rolled up, one hand pulling his hair back as he reads. The scar is as vivid as my Mark. Scattered threads of white in the black hair. Wire-frame glasses; behind them, faint lines of crow’s feet, eyes that still give away his every thought.

Such as, right now, the Healer in charge of the VSP case he’s reviewing is something of a troll with a Splinched brain.

That’s why he’d riled me – while I came up with choice insults that wouldn’t get myself into trouble, his eyes had already shouted a million "fuck you"s and walked away.

Damn him and those daft, those… beautiful eyes.

He’s put together well enough. I alluded to his softer silhouette as a Healer… but I appreciate it. For once, he doesn’t seem to be on some long suffering crusade so us mortals can live. I may not be the only one to think that. Teddy Lupin, who works in Visitor Services and helps at the coffee stand, is on an obvious campaign to change Potter’s preference for black coffee, teasing his weight-watching ways and bringing in the richest cappuccino for our perusal. Potter drinks those without complaints.

I suppose I can take a shot at the purple, thoroughly scratched girl’s watch on Potter’s wrist, on which every number plays the effect of a simple spell when that hour arrives. One is _“Lumos!”_ Two is _"Wingardium Leviosa!"_ … But I must Vanquish my Self-fill Quill first, which says _Fortescue’s_ on its brown-chequered trunk and has baby teeth marks on the equally purple bubble tip. It once tasted like elderberry ice cream.

I admit, it was not by chance that I came cross Potter’s Healer application. Potter was doing rounds downstairs and I was Expanding the room – to save Potter and I from imminent death in a parchment avalanche – when I came across the applications. I looked out of curiosity, but his was not there. A parchment note re-directed searchers to the Executive Meeting stacks.

I panicked. Why had I not considered such an obvious possibility before? What if Potter was a fluke practicing medicine with fame? He had no NEWTS. “Bookish” never quite described him. He had been an Auror, for Merlin’s sake, his job had been to hurt ….

I tore through the room. I was lucky. Once I found the cabinet, the blue application file stood out among the beige coloured executive meeting minutes.

It was also thicker than ten application files combined.

I Summoned it, raced to the Patient Records section, grabbed an armful of case files and distributed Potter’s application inside. I started reading on the dust-snowed floor.

No one had bothered to organise the contents in chronological order. On the top was a letter from a Healer, Ellie Hamilton. The subject was _RE: HJP admission to Healer’s Training Programme_. It was short:

_“I shall say this again: guilt is a toxic quality in a Healer._

_As long as Mr Potter is human, this applies to him as to anyone else. No one doubts his moral qualifications to be a Healer, but at this time, I am more likely to vouch for his sound judgment before another Voldemort than another case of VSP.”_

If Potter hadn’t showed up at that moment, I would have sprinted to the second floor and smuggled Scorpius home. But Potter did, and since all Records Room files are Tracked, I was forced to go through the rest of the application slowly, between the VSP cases I was given to review.

Why didn’t I confront him? His streak as the Saviour, possibly, and my streak as a … saviouree.

Habit is a curious thing.

 

 

*

Healer Hamilton was right about Potter’s motivation to join the training programme. His Personal Statement was about Ginevra Weasley and little else. He’d been on a mission with the Unspeakables in Siberia when she’d had her Crisis Zero, named for its pre-dating diagnosis. A violent spike of magic had torn through her as it would through my son. But Scorpius could afford to rest. Ginevra Weasley had three children and a Quidditch reporter job. By the time Potter could be reached, she had stabilized. She, too, insisted it’d been a bout of exotic flu.

If he’d been around during the crisis, Potter wrote, he might have been able to help identify the cancer. He would have observed. His instincts, on matters of life and death, were second to none. The diagnosis took Scorpius two weeks. It took Ginevra five.

He was brief on other details of his wife’s ailment. For that I was grateful. Still, the closing paragraph was painful to read. It was also surprising in its … dearth of sanity.

I’d never thought I would hear Potter, in his own words, acknowledge his place in the minds of many. But he did, and he ended the essay by saying that whenever he heard people call him Saviour, he felt mocked. Then he felt anger. Then hate. Not only did he want to heal so that no one had to suffer like his wife again, but he also wanted to cure this illness he had of a shrunken heart and, given who he was and his frequent visitor status as an Auror, he hoped he deserved a chance of another admission into St Mungo’s.

Anyone else who’d quilled this would be asking for a place in the Janus Thickey Ward.

But he was Potter. Only he could turn a simple application into fan fair, Wizengamot style. The hospital desperately wanted him. Not for his fame, but because for what he had done, how could they bear denying his wish, small as it was? So they’d come down with their own bout of guilt. After all, Potter would still have to pass Healer exams and write a dissertation. Healership had always been rife with survivor’s guilt – didn’t the frequent thefts in the Apothecary make clear of that?

The admissions committee, divided, went on to interview the personnel who’d seen him on his wife’s last days.

Mr Potter was perfectly sane, they chorused. Polite. Quiet, but spirited around his children. He had taken on the task of putting ointments on Mrs Potter’s skin and never missed one spot, an oversight even the most experienced Mediwizards were prone to make. Potter’s calm was so emphasised that in one of the letters exchanged, someone questioned a possible rift in the Potter-Weasley union.

It took a night-shift janitor named Cynthia to decipher Potter. A long-lost soul’s twin, no doubt, of Luna Lovegood. There’s a thing on Potter’s nose, she said, just under the bridge of his glasses. He had it the whole time on her stay. It looked like a small scratch but it always looked red and raw, like he’d just hurt himself, day after day. She asked about it, when she tidied the room and he said he got it in Siberia. It would mend itself, he assured her, they’d always had. But the scratch, or scar, was where Potter’s grief would get caught, making it look brighter even when his eyes were dry. It was so bright on the last week; Cynthia remembered, because she winced and on the last day, she cried and apologised for crying and started saying all the wrong things, like she hated it when people died like this, when the living could do nothing but watch. Potter folded the dirty linens for her and promised her that there was no such thing as doing nothing as long as he stayed alive, and he was too brilliant at that.

The file ended there.

 

 

*

Now, when I look across the table, I can see the “thing” Cynthia talked about. It faded long ago, but there is a small crease where the skin seems deeper, and lighter. The combination makes a peculiar camouflage, an invisible dent of sort. Maybe it isn’t the scar that kept his tears there, it is just part of him, the flesh he’s born with that keeps surviving in Death’s colosseum. All I know is, since reading the application I have this urge to feel that line under my finger.

I want to know the Guilt of a hero. Not a baggage, not a chink in an armour to be returned to the armoury someday. It’s a part of him, small and real, and he wears it with pride and ease. Like his daughter’s watch on his wrist.

 

##### II

If you wonder, if it is the same with my Fortescue’s Quill – I have no place in _The Romance Hour_ , the best I can do is the Epilogue when my audience’s kitchens are in flames – Potter knows my guilt. On the day he confirmed Scorpius’ diagnosis with me, it broke through and danced on my tongue, confounding my words, the convicted tone I’d practiced so well when it came to Astoria. This guilt I see and shall never unsee on Scorpius’ face. I don’t know why it happened then, maybe I need the Fates to see that I’m perfectly willing, perfect happy to live with this guilt, as long as they let me keep Scorpius.

I’d lied. Astoria didn’t want to extort more from our marriage contract when she self-Splinched in front of our four year old son. The scroll had sealed. She had produced my heir and I’d cleared the debt for the Greengrasses. What she wanted was to prove my breaking her heart, and she succeeded by breaking her body into two.

How had I not wanted a family with her, when we’d already been family? I’d loved her, she insisted. I’d kissed her over and over, on her lips, on her breasts… as I found the place to enter her and conceived our son. I’d done it again, on nights too cold for anyone, even former Death Eaters, to sleep alone. I’d been so gentle; I’d said the sweetest things, warmed her duvet with my body heat, scented her hair with my cologne.

My guilt was to let her believe that I could love like everyone else. She didn’t know that if I’d truly wanted her – the place I’d entered her sealed and hoisted with cock aside – I would have pushed her legs back and forced my tongue into where the filthiest of filth was, until my mouth became too sullied for kissing, too glossed with spit to whisper the wonders of that spark that was known to ignite every being, every thought of mundaneness within us.

The spit was my shining armour. Too bad I was never a Knight and she thought I was one.

Despair. Guilt. Courage. Love. There’s no love before courage. She forgot that.

She forgot that I, Draco Malfoy, am a coward.

 

##### III

Between the last sentence and this one, Potter asked why I had so much to write. Could I have found the thing that would save Scorpius?

No, I replied, and precisely for that reason I had to look away. I couldn’t keep reading failure after failure. The rants and invectives I had put on this parchment were so ugly, I promised him, that it’d make him uglier if he read it, if that’s possible.

He smiled and asked if I wanted to go home. “I’ve asked too much from you already,” he said. Then he bowed his head and tapped his quill on the list he was working. “Gets harder every time.” He looked into my eyes. “Thanks for helping.”

I reminded him that one, I hadn't been terribly useful, two, Scorpius was my son and three, he was who he was. A bone-headed Gryffindor, persistent to a fault and above all, a victor.

“I’ve skipped Gin’s file. The twenty-second time.” He looked sideways, brushed his hand against a file placed too neatly at the corner of the table. “Hers is the most recent VSP case. I should take a look at it.”

His voice was calm, strong, even, but the plea in his eyes was impossible to miss.

So I schemed, as I had when his eyes had screamed his million "fuck you"s, and offered a proposal.

 

 

*

And here I am now, penning my _choicest, most hideous insults_ to the smell of coffee – black, he insisted this time – and sniffles so soft, so scattered that the dust could easily pass as culprit. It's two in the morning; he has barely gone through a third of the scrolls, his notes meticulous in deceptive chicken-scratch. I have just untied the one with her finalized diagnosis, slipped it under the parchment he is reviewing, and refilled his mug. I’ve promised to stalk him to the bathroom, should the need arises, and herd him back here.

To his guilt, his pain.

His eyes are dry, his face, barely a touch redder except for that hair-breadth crease on his nose, which has gone up a full shade. His road to Redemption scales the tallest mountains if mine has swerved in a gulch, but stones are stones and the hardship, the hurt are familiar. I’ve walked my path. Done so willingly, perhaps. Happily? Never.

At least he doesn’t have to cry alone.

It’s summer solstice. The sun will rise soon enough.

  
  
  


 

 

### COURAGE

 

A neigh, lurid and distressed, forced me to look that way. It tore through the night, bright and cackling with wildfire afar. Smoke sizzled on the soil where the Thestral had set its hooves. It threshed, kicked its forelegs high and neighed again, insisting on a return to the river it had crossed. Thick water splashed and rained the shore red. The rider, in full black, pointed his green staff to the land and urged its companion on.

I recognised the river. It had supplied the land with all it needed but at the moment, it was boiling, bubbling like the finest, deadliest potion. The distant hills were dark and wilted and I recognised them at once, too. I had known them well before they’d been plundered.

As for the rider… it was odd. He was both familiar and an utter stranger to me, not unlike the bodies in the crypt below the Manor. But I just knew that I’d been waiting for him, the rightful owner of the steed. He had come before with an imposter who was responsible for all the destruction and heartbreak. This rider had the staff – The Stem, a voice incredibly like Potter’s corrected me – that proved the legend about him was real. That hidden in this vast landscape was a small band of guardians who watched over it, who were fierce, loyal to no one but the earth they lived on, choosing obscurity over empty conquests against foes they considered lesser to them. They let them have their victory parades, let the wine drown their courage and the food burst their waistlines. They let them die on their own.

 _Get on with the story, Draco._ Potter’s voice again. I kept my eyes across the river and ignored him. Even in ash-heavy air I could smell the coffee he was sipping. Why was he with me? Why wasn’t he doing something with the rider, being a Saviour and all that?

I’d have to ask him at a later time, I thought. This… whatever was unfolding, I must know. My life depended on it.

The rider surveyed the land. I could hear the crisp _clop, clop, clop_ of the Thestral, which was nonsense, for the hooves were sinking in mud so soaked with – no, not the river, but its sweat. Eerily clear too was my vision, how I could see every fold of the black robe wrapped around the rider, the hem so long that it draped over the flanks of the Thestral, and its corners dripped red from the river. Only his eyes showed above the head cloth and they were cold and harsh; this was why the destroyer who’d come before could play him — they were so alike in many ways, so powerful that they each could, alone, take over the hills and waters.

Scorched trees expanded into view, charred fruits like nodules hung on the blackened bark. Tumours. It was an old forest of sort, or an orchard too vast for anyone’s imagination. The rider pulled on a branch and it snapped off. I coughed. Violently. He was pleased. He leapt off the Thestral and forged ahead, with me doubled over in pain, and he, stabbing the soil deeper with every step of his boots.

So the legends held true. Only when there was nothing left, nothing that could even define victory or defeat, would The Stem make its move. The guardians were not born fighters. They nourished the land such that fighters could be born. Was this rider all I got? Or were there more, surveying the destruction hidden from my eyes?

 _You only need one,_ Potter supplied. Something warm pressed into my hand and I expected a coffee mug, but it felt organic, soft and strong at once. Calloused. I didn’t look down. _It’s just that nobody knows how many you start with, and how many you would’ve given to Scorpius…_

Scorpius. I smiled. As long as he’s cared for.

A crash. My vision rippled and the rider was lost in the waves. The warmth in my hand dissipated. I found, instead, cold glass strewn over a wooden floor. Scents of dittany and antiseptics overpowered the stench of sweat and blood.

“Your bitch is on the tower!” a witch’s voice hissed amidst whooshes of clean-up magic, all closer to me but so muffled. “Go save her, you galloping, prancing piece of nitwit!” Footsteps came from afar. From… outside.

_Click._

The sounds plunged in a downward swirl into static. The click was a button… of that box shoved beside me as the door creaked. “Bloody reruns,” the voice mumbled, just before a bright, loud voice interjected from the door’s direction.

“Mediwitch Davies, how are our Mr Malfoys doing today?”

 

 

*

It could’ve been worse, the timing and way I regained conscious. Ten minutes late and the hero of this episode of _The Romance Hour_ would have been the one ridden, not the one riding – the audience can’t tell Virgins apart from Veelas these days. Mediwitch Davies could have fed me the wrong potions instead of dropping them, shoved something far more sinister than a smuggled-in wireless under my blanket. She wouldn’t have felt sorry, to say the least.

I wouldn’t wake up for another week, not until Scorpius crawled on my bed and refused to return to his own. He’d woken soon after Potter had sent us to the hospital, his body so ravaged by the cancer that, just as Potter had dared to plan and I had dared to hope, it was primed for a seedling to take hold, like forest grounds after a wild fire. What Scorpius re-kindled when he held me – what embers had remained of my life – I was told by Healer Hamilton, was the most ancient need of a parent to protect, the most primeval will to love. It called for magic, and the origin of magic inside me, a seedling too it must be, heeded the call. All that it sprouted to protect Scorpius just happened to put me on the mend.

Muggles call the seedlings stem cells for a cause, I suppose.

The hospital has kept Scorpius and me in the same room, made temporarily Unplottable as is the custom for St Mungo's celebrity and criminal customers. Intruders are rampant, all wanting a piece of our story with Potter playing a part. As it has been every evening, we are currently graced with the caring presence of Mediwitch Davies and her portable wireless, once again the object of her hissing, obscenity-laden passion. She has neglected to cast a weather charm for us, no surprise there, but it turns out to be a blessing as Scorpius is too fascinated to hear a word from her with Muggle cars rushing below and flashing screens and waffle fingerboards in offices an arm’s reach from our window. Davies handed me the parchment and quill a moment ago, deviating from the standard protocol of dumping them on my lap. The host had just announced another rerun and the glorious language spewing from her mouth has proved taxing for the lump of fat between her ears.

I’d be terribly remiss if I don’t write a good amount, wouldn’t I? I agree with her. Nathaira Fe (a.k.a. The Pug-faced Cunt) is not writing nearly enough.

 

##### I

Sages have said that courage is as much about insistence as it is about letting go. They’re sages because they keep mum about when and where is which.

A part of me had expected St Mungo’s to reject Potter’s proposal to reverse VSP by a transplant of magic. In Risk Assessment, in which applicants must report historical failures related to the suggested methods, Potter had had no choice but to cite the only case of hospital-approved magic transfusion.

It’d happened a good fifty years ago, from a wizard father to his only son. My childhood gifts had bore their surname.

The failure was nothing short of spectacular. The child remained magicless. The father transferred again. Still, nothing. On the day of the third transplant, the child came in with bruises and barely a heartbeat. _I’ve ruined him_ , said the father, _so my magic will make him live_. The child never opened his eyes again. A month later, the father ruined his own life at home.

Applicants must then make a case of why the proposal was still worth of pursuing.

What the case showed, Potter argued, was that magical transplants could be conducted at least once in a healthy subject – that the fabled origin of magic in every wizard, though invisible to physical and spell vision, existed in discrete, multiple if small number of packages that could be safely isolated and relocated. Functionally, these packages were analogous to what Muggles referred to as stem cells and equally elusive they were, but Muggle medicine had been able to harness their powers for blood cancer treatment…

… which, Potter emphasised, was in no way similar to Squib Restoration. A Squib’s every cell was designed to function optimally without magic. Scorpius, on the other hand, had lived by magic as plants lived by light. A magical transplant had nothing to replenish or fix in a Squib, but in Scorpius, it would be his best and only hope for survival. Having his father, the giver of Scorpius’ innate magic, as the magical donor would ensure also its best chance.

That part of me had conceded then. If an argument against Squib Restoration in a request on behalf of the Malfoys didn’t make the review committee Wingardium themselves and chant _comeuppance_ , nothing else would. Logically, Potter assured me flaws existed and the review committee would see them. And I must know them, my risks as the donor and the father. Such as, for example, that there was no telling I would possess similar amounts of… magic “stems" or they would behave the same way in me and in Scorpius. More importantly, Muggle medicine had suggested stem and cancer cells were not unlike Archangels Michael and Lucifer – what made cancers so destructive was their near-immortal power to grow, the same power stem cells exercise to rebuild an assaulted tissue. Cancers are known to hijack the homes and travel paths of their better brothers, being imposters and mirror images…

We were sitting face-to-face, coffee mugs in his right hand and my left. As he talked, we were both set to raise our drinks for a sip.

My observation was about to be heard when he dropped his mug, mumbled _too hot_ and did a Wronski Feint with the topic.

Seeker to seeker, I wasn’t fooled. Michael had reached into fire for Lucifer before.

When Muggles had blood cancer, Potter continued later, there’s a step before the transplant and now that he thought about it, it’s not unlike a slow _Avada Kedavra_ – there was light, then all marrow cells, good and bad, would die. My eyebrows must have fused with my hair and he said, it’s such that the stems would get a clean start. That was when he told me about wild forest fires, and that for all the destruction, they left the soil primed for regrowth.

I thought of the orchard in the manor and the apples. How deep must the fire go for the destruction to be complete? Even a reborn phoenix left ashes.

Instead, I asked Potter how did the Muggle Healers force their patients into the Avada Kevadra Room. Did they put them down with whatever potions they had? Strap them and cart them in?

They walked in themselves, he replied.

I was about to retort that being critically low on sleep didn’t make me a fool, but before I could gather my words, he folded his arms and leaned towards me from his side of the table. He had same _hex-me_ look he’d had in Hogwarts. Smug and full of it because he’s sure he was right.

 _Just like how you’ve walked your life after the war_ , he said.

 

##### II

Courage, as defined by Potter that time, must be made in cogs and wheels.

If I’ve done one thing right with Scorpius, it’s that I’ve made sure he speaks Muggle. He knows the Tube, owns the Seafood Card riders use to get on. On the rare days we ventured outside of the manor, I took him beyond Diagon Alley, where he breathed in the sights and sounds of life devoid of magic.

Once, we visited the Tower of London. The Muggle crown jewels were far less impressive than the contraption under our feet. It’s called a moving walkway, we found out.

No matter how still we stand, it moves us on.

Like time. Like inertia. How could Potter have mistaken it as anything else?

 

 

*

Walkways end. Inevitably and abruptly.

The Monitoring Charm had yet to go off when we saw it, when Scorpius and I must take a stride or fall. The manor was quiet. Dipsy was diluting the nutrient potion concentrate in the kitchen. Yet, the armchair in the study I’d dozed off in had grown spikes, steel teeth like those on the moving walkway. I couldn’t sit for another second.

The cause was clear once I entered the bedroom.

Children had a way of crying such that only their parents could hear. Scorpius was facing the window, leaving me with the sight of dull and matted hair too weak to stand on its own.

A foul odour assaulted my nose.

Potter had warned of this. The loss of physical functions as VSP entered its final stage was more than a loss of mobility. It was also a loss of control, of dignity.

Scorpius sobbed. “Call Dipsy,” he whispered. “Please, Father, call Dipsy to clean…”

Strength came to me. Not that I knew then and even now I don’t know how. Strength so much like… the Heir of Courage that I never thought I’d had, for it would have had slumbered through a war and its trials. But what was it otherwise? What was it that propelled me to move, to sound as if I knew exactly what to do?

“Let Father take care of it.” I scooped Scorpius up, in his blanket cocoon, and walked us both to the bathroom. My steps were wide, sure. I even turned the perfect angle such that Scorpius, clinging onto me once I had him in my arms, never saw the soiled patch on the sheets. Only when the tap was blasting did I unwrap my son. I Banished the blanket when it was a drenched pile on the floor.

Scorpius’ body was a wasteland of bones and blemishes. His skin inflamed with the contact of any magic; the Monitoring Charm, a necessary evil, left miniscule boils wherever it touched, each small and vivid like distant stars. With lightest hands, I sponged his back with the Muggle soap Potter had given me ( _I cleared out three Tescos when Ginny said she liked it._ ). Scorpius had stopped crying, and was trying, in vain, to blow off bubbles.

“Father.”

“Yes?” I looked up, and finally, had my son looking at me.

“What’s your first day like in Hogwarts?”

I’d never told him about my school years. He’d requested that. _I’ll be a Slytherin_ , he’d said, _I’ll play Quidditch, make Prefect and…_. He only wanted to hear things he would never see. Deep down, I suspected my avid reader of a son was too kind to make me the narrator of my story. So I’d patched together gossips and rumours I’d heard from Pansy, built the world from the nooks and crannies I was allowed to visit as Inquisitor, and make up the missing links. Harry Potter’s adventures in Remedial Potions were the highlight of my composition.

That was, perhaps, how my stint as a storyteller had begun.

Why Scorpius asked for my story in the bath was not lost on me. If we’d belonged to fairytales, I’d tell him, in my best McGonagall impression, that not only would he see the school himself, he would live to be the finest wizard of his generation, strong and fair in every sense. And Scorpius would believe, an angelic nod not amiss, and do as told.

But Death made no dramatic entrance, no strutting through a grand doorway that a defiant father could shut in its face. It infested, instead, like doxies in old houses. So I filled the bath with fresh hot water. The Hogwarts Express bellowed, and we lost ourselves in the steam, the tears of parents saying goodbyes.

 

 

*

Scorpius and I never reached the castle. He fell sleep on the boat and woke again in his bed, as I dabbed ointment on his boils. Dipsy had changed the sheets while we were in the bath, along with the exhausted nutrient potion drip.

The moon was as bright as it had been on the Black Lake. From the open window wafted in the scent from our orchard. Scorpius struggled to breathe it in.

I buttoned his pyjamas. Beside us gleamed the silver needle from the drip, biding its time to pin my son down.

Scorpius, his fingers trembling, reached for the cap of the needle. I stopped him.

"We’re going outside," I said. We would search for the exact line where the Unplottable land of the Malfoys ended and the rest of the world began. He’d always wanted to know, hadn’t he? And I’d always told him he could look for it when he grew older, when he’d no longer care to find out. Like his Father before him, or his Grandfather, or anyone of his forefathers.

So, with sweets in his mouth and mine, and my son riding on my back in his winter wool jacket, we set out on our adventure. We followed the path of old Flutterby bushes behind the manor, zigzagged our way through deserted peacock nests and mounds of rotten apple cores deposited by migratory birds, until we reached the banks of a brook. I remembered, or I’d dreamed, that one time, our old house elf confessed to my childhood self that he was dripping wet because he’d fallen into a brook behind our house. House elves could Apparate anywhere, but where incompatible lands met, the winds in their Apparition world would change; he’d been brought down, distracted by the many chores he’d been asked to do.

 _Bang! Bang!_ clamoured the pot against his head. _Please, please, young master. Please forgive Dobby…_.

I washed my face with the water in the brook, painted the tip of Scorpius’ nose with a drop. “Hold on tight,” I said, and Scorpius obeyed with a chuckle. He shone, nourished by the moonlight in a way the drip could never do. “Go, Father,” he whispered, and off I went.

I started with strides and broke into a jog. The summer’s breeze swept against my face. I felt for its change. Would it blow one direction on my left side and another on my right? From afar, the bright fruits in the orchard emerged from its shadows. I went faster, faster...

My clothes stuck on my skin; my hair, to the corner of my eyes. Then I was singing. Shouting. The grip holding onto me had lost strength. The weight on my back turned to lead. When the wind died, I stopped; or was it the other way around? “You think we found it?” I asked. When silence responded, I asked again, to the moon this time and turned. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t look back.

In fifteen minutes, we were back in the Manor house. The largest Unplottable land in Wiltshire proved so small for us. Yet another fifteen minutes and I was back in the study, on the chair I’d dozed off before. I emptied my pocket on the desk and, one by one, I unwrapped the sweets and put them in my mouth. Crushed them with my teeth.

The Monitoring Charm went off on the second last one. The song I’d sung to the moon drifted into the study. It was a lullaby. My choice, and Potter had keyed it in, note by note. I stood, opened the window wide and let in the breeze. With my Mother’s wand that’d sat on the desk for the last fortnight, I, for the first time as the Master of the house, demanded to see the access list for its wards.

Names appeared in the air. So many of them, each crossed out and re-enlisted. So many of them, all dead.

I erased them, one after another. Their allegiance. Their betrayal. One old name, I traced over with fresh magic. Astoria Greengrass. One new name I keyed in, letter by letter.

_This is final, I promise._

Out in the moonlight, the wrought iron gate shuddered, shaking off the dust, the soot, remnants of two wars that had buried its memories of how to let in a friend, trusted with access for life.

The wind rose. I shuddered, and waited for my Healer to come.

 

##### III

The other time Potter defined courage, he’d made sure there was no definition at all.

It happened on the day we requested for Scorpius’ immediate discharge, after the rejection of our proposal and much to the hospital’s annoyance. Anyone could smell the rising rebel in Potter, his Auror at heart too ready to defy protocols and rescind oaths for a chance to save a life – in this case, a perfectly illegal transplant of magic in the perfect privacy of a manor. But for imminent sins there could be no reproach, so Healer Potter was free to roam, defiance written all over him.

Mediwitches swooned in his wake. Defiance, in the lore of heroes, was a close kin of Power.

I avoided his wake, amused.

I would soon acquaint myself with Power’s third kin. The one, who, in _The Romance Hour_ , lurked in darkness, only his eyes could be seen stealing the golden rays from the King’s throne.

His name was fear.

It was pouring. I’d lost Potter in a _pop_ when the hospital staff claimed to have displaced yet another page of the discharge parchment. So I went floor to floor in search of a coffee-toting, four-eyed puffer fish.

In the lobby, behind the waterfall rushing down the mannequin’s display window, I thought I saw a silhouette across the street.

Potter didn’t seem at all surprised that I found him, under an Impervious Charm plus a mild Disillusionment charm that muddled his presence with the rain. I wiped my face and searched for my wand.

“Squeeze in.” He lifted his cup for a drink. “There’s room for two of us.”

By room, he meant magic. St Mungo’s self-touted impenetrable Apparition shield had been so until minutes ago.

He sensed my hesitance. “Touch me. Anywhere.”

I stepped beside him, shoulder against shoulder. His strength, his warmth cocooned us.

“You’re not supposed to be angrier than I,” I said.

He shrugged. “I do angry better.” His attention fell to my empty hands. “Your coffee?”

“Left it with the trolls.”

He handed me his mug.

I took a sip and returned the mug to him. It touched his lips when I said, “Forgot to tell you, I carry deadly viruses.”

The corner of his mouth, imbibing, curled up, his neck stretched for a perfect display of his Adam’s apple. “Remind me when we kiss.”

 

 

*

We fell into silence, the coffee mug passed back and forth between us. I confess, I’d started the flirting and that time, too, had amounted to static no _Romance Hour_ s could play. Potter had stared at me and the way he did, the spark it ignited… _it’s interest_ , insisted my eyes and my mind scoffed, for what could be less possible, given our past, and less appropriate, given our present? But my eyes had refused to concede and they’d brought in witness from inside my chest…

Potter was people-watching.

The hospital was one of the few places where the theatrics of romance belonged. Against the grey London sky, greyer concrete walls and still greyer faces of past and future visitors, a red umbrella stood out. A couple nestled under its canopy, a young man fuzzing with the hair and clothes of his equally young wife. He, so skilled in umbrellaship, was the likely Muggleborn of the pair; she appeared unscathed but for a cast on her arm. The rain stole their words from my ears, but from his frown, her smile and interrupting kisses, the conversation couldn’t stray far from _promise you’ll never do this again_ , _promise I’ll never_ and _promise, I’ll be all right_.

_Promise. Promise. Promise._

It was not exciting. It was not worthy of care. Except for the fabled hero beside me, whose expression could only be described as longing. Open, heartrending longing. He smiled when she smiled, smiled wider when they kissed.

Expectedly, he forgot his drink.

“Sorry,” he said.

The last sips of coffee trickled into a puddle. At the sight, my thoughts — my one question — escaped my tongue, in a whisper. “Harry, have you found someone?”

 

 

*

I got no reply. Instead, in a concision usually reserved for reporting Dark Artists, Potter described the someones he’d thought he’d found. Two women, two men; Muggles, who he’d thought he’d wanted, until he’d found himself improvising stories about his life, his past, his everything. Until the man who’d had Potter thought he was a good enough liar promised to believe Potter’s every word, as long as Potter would tell the world he was straight.

“He was … on top of me.” Potter said, almost to himself, with a light chuckle.

That was the low point of his life. The truth was, he was sick of losing the people he loved, a curse that’d seemed particularly undeniable since he’d set foot in Diagon Alley. He’d thought he’d shaken it off with the war, then Ginny died. He got scared. Terrified. Enough to lie to himself that he’d loved those someones when his thoughts were filled with himself - where he could find peace, how he could get to the next day with his façade intact.

But fear had not left him alone. So he’d formed a new strategy, which was to see no one. Went to hospital, see work. Went home, see family.

He stopped there.

I heeded the invitation in his eyes. “How’s that strategy going?” I asked.

His heels bobbled against the ledge of the pavement. “Not very well,” he replied. “Someone showed up at my workplace cafeteria. Family too, through my godson.”

The couple across the street had molten into tears. They embraced, her hurt arm sticking out awkwardly towards the traffic. His red umbrella fell, tipped and became a vessel for the rain. I traced the birthplace of the water, up, up, high into the heavens.

The Fates were there, watching behind the clouds. I addressed them, whispered again the question that, more than ever, demanded an answer. “So, Harry, have you found someone?”

The charms around me oscillated, like wind chimes. They subsided to a warmth that brushed against my hand.

“Coffee found him. Then it found me. The rest, I don’t know.”

My fingertips felt their way against the warmth. It was organic, soft and strong at once. Calloused. I didn’t look down. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

With this admission, he proved himself still a million times braver than I.

“Not that it matters. I should have known.” Potter’s gaze returned to the drenched couple, her hands in his, their world only them and no one else. He smiled. “Things happen when they’re meant to. Strange, between you and I, but it’s you and I.” Then he, too, confided with the skies. “Draco, are you afraid?”

He could be asking about the transplant, which he’d promised to do privately should Scorpius slip into VSP’s final stage and our appeal to St Mungo’s hadn’t gone through. But more immediate was the warmth, offered within my reach. Was I afraid to receive it - the gift, the possible curse that might come with it?

Faraway, a thunder attempted a roar. The storm was passing. In the tinkles of the rain, I thought of Astoria, the playful smacks of her lips on mine, her last words, dripping hurt like the blood she would spill.

_Draco, why is it so hard to let me in?_

Her hair used to curl when it rained like this. Scorpius’, too. Coils, in near perfect circles, not sure where they could cling to and so they closed in on air. I’d never said aloud how much I loved them on those rainy days.

I closed my hand.

“I’m not afraid. I’m ready.”

  
  
  


 

 

### LOVE

 

Love is a seed. The Muggle Stem. It finds the right soil, in time, by chance, and it sprouts and grows.

Like the whittled rocks under a glacier, or the waterfall at a cliff, it is not so much a choice as a consequence. For, when it comes to love, the only choice is to accept or deny. Shave off the rocks. Dam the cliff. Snip the buds and parch the soil, as inevitably another seed will be brought in, be it by a breeze or a gale.

I’ve just found some old writings in my study, clipped with the medi-parchments documenting Scorpius’ cancer and recovery seven years ago. _Despair. Guilt. Courage._ I want to finish this story, my first with I, Draco Malfoy, as the main character much like a hero in _The Romance Hour_ – as lucky, for one.

As loved in the end, for another.

 

##### I

Andromeda and Teddy became family even before Scorpius and I left St Mungo's. Teddy had played owl for Potter and I while the malpractice trial had banned us from communication, by claiming he had visitation rights as my cousin (true) and a close one, for I’d been a frequent guest of his home for his grandma’s famous drink (not so much). It was therefore imperative that I paid a visit, as soon as my health permitted, so that my taste buds could play catch up.

The drink was mulled cider. I smelled it once I stepped foot into the cottage, at six in the evening, sharp. Work had kept Teddy in the hospital.

The music of _The Romance Hour_ came on. Andromeda led me to the kitchen, free of pleasantries. She silenced the wireless with an dismissive wave.

“Not a fan?” I asked.

She lowered herself slowly into a chair. “I have standards, Draco,” she said with a glare, equal parts stern and amused.

I almost replied, _Yes, Mother_.

She asked me to help myself to the pot on the stove. _No magic_ , she warned. As I ladled the cider, the spices woke and soothed my senses, as did the honey-sweetness of the fruit. If only Mother had talked to her…

I also prepared a mug for Andromeda, and knew I’d past a test from the twitch on her lips. I sat down and braced myself for a “I’ll Avada Kedavra you if you hurt Harry Potter”-talk.

But she sat in silence. Took a sip of her drink, then another. Half way through her mug, she announced, “Harry likes cappuccinos.”

That caught me off guard. “Sorry?”

She repeated. Then she explained, succinctly, that Ginny had been the black coffee advocate and the couple had bickered back and forth for fun. Harry switched to black after he’d lost her.

“Get him back to his cream and sugar, Draco,” she said, smiling not at me but the memories. “He has quite a sweet tooth.”

 

##### II

That makes six of us, the sweet-toothed Potters and Malfoys.

Children have their own gauges when it comes to what makes a worthy friend. Surnames carry a weight, but no more than the other things they’re told by authorities, parents and strangers likewise, which are all feather light in the face of games and sweets.

I had not had such a bad case of nerves in my life, not even when I stood trial for the war, when, in the backyard of Potter’s cottage, Scorpius stood face-to-face with the three Potter children. It didn’t help matters that he was still frail from recovery, waif-thin and pale even by Malfoy standards.

At Potter’s advice, we watched from the kitchen.

“I’m Scorpius Malfoy. I’m eleven and, um, I’ll start Hogwarts this September.”

James and Lily had both taken on their mother’s looks. But the hawkish gaze of the son was distinctly Potter’s, an evolved, sharper version of the Stare. I’d seen it when Potter was healing my son, discerning the signs offered by the Monitoring Charms. No doubt, the same gaze had helped Potter chase his enemies as an Auror.

And now, it was served to my son. Worse, for a brief moment it flicked towards the kitchen. James knew we’re watching.

It was Albus, a Polyjuiced Potter head-to-toe unlike his siblings, who spoke up first. I had not expected that. He’d shown immense interest in the grass, or his half-tied shoelaces. He tilted his head and smiled. “Me too.”

Once he spoke, his sister slumped her shoulders. “I thought I’m not supposed to talk and have to shake hands and stuff!” She approached Scorpius, until she was almost nose-to-nose against him, and announced in a single breath, “Hi I’m Lily Luna Potter Dad calls me Lily-bug I’m nine and I’ll start Hogwarts in two years if I have a letter but if not I’ll go anyway like Dad and Uncle Ron in a car and of course I may get expelled but then it’ll be so cool and everyone will like me and then they’ll have to keep me!” She grinned – proving that she, too, was a Potter spawn – and fished out a palmful of sweets from her pocket. “I made these at Teddy’s. Tell me how they taste, okay?”

I felt a smile by my ear. “There. Done.”

 

 

*

I brought Scorpius to the Potter’s because neither of us could fathom a relationship without our children’s approval. Also, Scorpius would benefit from sunshine and air and Potter offered his children to be his companions for the summer, since I couldn’t possibly watch over him in the orchard all day. I’d thought it would mean the Potter children coming to Wiltshire, knowing that the Potters live in a cottage that, even considering Potter’s taste for the very casual, seemed small and run-down.

 _It’s got a secret,_ he’d promised.

After the “initiation”, Potter and I headed for the backyard, which, while charming _à la Potter_ with its lopsided broomshed and frameless swings, was still no place to roam. Al and Lily were arguing the merits of offering new friends sweets without wrappers and crawling with lint. James had cleaned up a batch and offered them to Scorpius.

“Let’s go to the hillside,” Potter said. Lily and Al gave a collective “woot!”, ran to the corner of the backyard and… vanished.

“Can Scorpius…” James asked. His father nodded at Scorpius. _Ask him_ , it meant. James didn’t hesitate. “It’s steep, the slope, for a bit. You think you can walk it?” The hawkish look returned, for one second, on Scorpius’ twig-thin legs.

“Mmm.” Scorpius swallowed and looked at me. I signaled _Speak to James_ , who offered immediately. “I can carry you if it gets tough, if you don’t mind riding my back. Al and Lily run off now, but they’ll want me to carry them on the return trip.” He rolled his eyes, but the pride in his smile was unmistakable.

Later, I would learn that Ginny’s passing affected James the most.

Scorpius, expectedly, chose to walk on his own. He did so with effort, one small step after another. James seemed to go in his own pace, whistling lightly, but never strayed more than arm's length away from Scorpius.

Potter and I followed in a distance. I had a vague sense when I got through the vanishing point, but the path under my feet never broke. A faint fragrance guided us on, as we circumvented a large rock that seemed to appear out of nowhere on the grassy knoll, as if some giants had had a game of shot put and hurled it out of bounds. Then the view cleared to a green pasture the size of several Malfoy orchards, dotted with cottongrass and orchids and the blue butterflies resting upon them. The fragrance came from the woodland on the far end. Apple trees.

Scorpius gave a "woot!", every bit as loud and daft as his new friends’, and ran.

Potter took my hand in my pocket and linked our fingers. “Welcome to my backyard.”

 

 

*

Ottery St. Catchpole, as the only remaining Magical-Muggle community in Britain, had a history far longer than the Statute of Secrecy. There’s no particular need for cartographers to draw accurate boundaries at its birth. As a consequence, the Hillside, marked by the Rock on one end and the Woodland on the other, were made both Unplottable to the Muggles and Out of Bounds to the Wizards. Potter’s cottage was in Wizarding Ottery, while Muggles inhabited the streets behind the trees.

Scorpius would soon find his second home. He would learn from the Potter children the art of playing with others, of play-acting an oaf while nobody was watching. Meanwhile, the Potter children would learn from him the etiquettes of formal dinners in which they had to sit too often, along with the list of innocent behaviours conductive to the scoring of extra deserts and permissions to slip out during dull speeches, including and especially their Dad’s.

And Scorpius, and I, would finally learn the secret of sweet apples.

It was Potter’s birthday. James also made it a celebration of Scorpius’ official recovery, using the fifth year benchmark defined by Muggles. It called for a bigger cake and a bottle of Ogden’s Old.

Our little party was well under way. I’d managed to make Potter drink his third cappuccino by refusing to touch a cup without a perfect milk Rosetta. James, tittering on the border of intoxication, had officially become the envy of his siblings, who’d all had enough sugar to fly without magic.

“So, who won?” Lily asked, grabbing the last Snitch puff I’d made and licked off the cream. Scorpius had straightened the wings with a touch of magic, a culinary sin that she, the faithful disciple of Andromeda’s school of cooking, had made me promise to never commit.

“I did, of course!” Scorpius chimed in, a little too quickly. He knelt on the chair, retrieved and enlarged a sack from his pocket and emptied the contents. Eleven apples, red, green and perfect in every way, lined up on the table.

Al scoffed. “Loser.” He proceeded to display what he’d collected in five minutes of tree climbing down at the Hillside. Thirty-eight total.

His sister burst into chortles. “Merlin, Al, you pick apples like you pick girls.”

“In other words –” James, drinking from the bottle, reached for a fruit and rubbed his thumb against a worm hole “– you don’t pick.”

Al hissed, “Dad’s here.”

Potter rested his elbows on the table with his mug cradled in his palms. “I’m staying out of this one.” He nodded at Scorpius’ bounty and threw me a flirtatious, utterly un-Potter wink. “Let’s say I’m a Malfoy pick.”

For one moment, the children formed a united front. “Ugh. Dad.” “Ugh. Mr Potter.”

Dad drank his coffee with an utterly Malfoy smirk.

“But,” Al spoke again, tone defiant, “Scorpius’ apples will never be sweet.”

Lily pulled Al’s apples towards her, sorted out the bad ones and set them aside. “All right. Twenty-three total for you,” she concluded. “Of course they will.” She gathered Scorpius’ apples and examined them the same way. “Just … a year longer. Wow, Scorpius. You win. You’re brilliant.”

“Brilliant at what?” Scorpius’ voice wavered. Right there, at the kitchen table in front of the mutilated cake, he was once again the child who’d watched me drink my morning juice, wide-eyed and unsure.

I might have the same look.

Potter noticed. “All right, Lily-bug,” he said lightly. “I want to know, too. Enlighten us.”

Al and James, no fans of kitchen talks, groaned. Lily pulled the hem of her T-shirt, pulled her long red hair back and straightened in her seat. “Well, you see, it’s like this…”

Well, you see, it’s like this – the Woodland was, like Ottery St. Catchpole, a union of the Muggle and the magical. That’s how the trees were as well, such as the Sturmer Pippins, the same apple trees Mother had planted in the manor. It’s not a one way or another affair. Every tree had its own unique balance of Magic and Muggle, settled by time and fine-tuned by chance. In fact, all Muggle or all magical apples had probably ceased to exist, but their closest cousins were still identifiable. Muggle apples looked lopsided, had blemishes here and there, but they sweetened quickly in storage. Magical apples looked perfect because they’d been chosen that way; the wait for them to sweeten was long because their beauty came from a prolonged youth, but a young apple was also an unpalatable one.

It dawned on me. My son, who’d learned about apples in the Manor orchards, had gathered only the rare, near magical apples.

Scorpius sank into his chair. “So my apples are no good.”

“No, not at all!” Lily shook her head. “Andromeda has wanted apples like yours for ages. I picked some for her but she said I wasn’t choosy enough.” She grinned, apologetically, and offered her half-eaten Snitch puff to Scorpius, who finished it without a thought. “She’s sure that magical apples are much sweeter, if people bothered to wait. She also said…” she paused, with a chew of her lips. “I guess it’s okay for me to say, since Mr Malfoy is her family, which means she’s talking about our family. Andromeda was teary-eyed and I’d never saw her like that, but she said she wouldn’t mind them even if she’s wrong and the apples stayed sour, because she’d grown up with them with her sisters and –”

She blinked, her lightning fast words finally caught at the snag of the story, the one I could see coming when Andromeda had made her entrance. Sure enough, she turned to me, and I offered what I hoped to be an encouraging look. “Andromeda said, even though her sisters didn’t care to wait and teased her for wanting to, she missed them. She wished it didn’t take so long, so much courage she hadn’t had… for her to admit she loved them, regardless.”

 

##### III

World-class stalker that he was, it took Potter all but two weeks into our relationship to figure out I was Nathaira Fe. Then he had the gall to snicker all over the dinner we were having. One in the wine. Three in the soup. Eight in the steak and counting.

“Fine,” I said. “Laugh.”

And He-Who-Never-Listens-to-a-Word-I-Say did exactly that. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”

I shot him my most brutal glare. Off to the deep end he went again.

“It’s brilliant, really.” He came to, finally, playing with the steak knife I’d thrown at him. “You have the say on Love for half the Wizarding population…” He leaned over and kissed me. “That’s more than what anyone else can do.”

He’s like that. Acts like an Auror but talks like an Unspeakable. Quiet, mutters the most mundane, broken phrases when he has to. But when he _wants_ to, he says his thing that hits so hard that I stand no chance against it.

We still fight. Often when I don’t seem important enough to be spared a full sentence, never mind a thought-out one. Useless as we may be, the Malfoy line is one of orators and operates on words. Plays mind-chess with them. Starts wars and murders. Makes peace and love.

He knows this about me, and diverts our battles to where he has a more even ground. Where his wrecked sentences and guttural grunts are not only welcomed, but desired.

I fall for it, happily.

Inquiring minds, pay heed — Harry Potter is loud in bed. He wants _more_ , _deeper_ , his knees pinned by his ears with his Auror’s grip – impossibly strong and steady – while I expose him, then reach for and explore what I see with my tongue. _Fuck_. Lost in his moan, this otherwise pointless word becomes the most powerful aphrodisiac there is.

He wants me. He wants love and makes sure I believe it, for I am to make it and give it to him.

Once upon a time, I’d used Legilimens on the men who'd opened up for me. As I’d shoved my tongue through their sphincter, these words would, like pure menthol, pierce through the heavy musk I’d let into my senses. _Draco Malfoy likes it filthy. Colour me surprised._ I’d looked up, and eyes that would have locked with mine in _The Romance Hour_ would have locked with the serpent on my arm, and the mouth that should have been dry and breathless with need, curled into a smile that was either too polite or self-satisfied. Once, twice… and the knowledge that I was no more than a curiosity, or a conduit for revenge, became a comfort. I’d known my place in the world and it was confirmed. And if I had a place… it could only mean, in a twisted way, that I belonged. The thought compelled me to go deeper, harder, as the fragile string of fluid between my thighs broke and gelled cold on the sheets.

_Look. Draco Malfoy can’t even get hard._

I can. As Potter’s gasps have attested, many times over. As his hands that fly down to join mine, to guide my cock inside him…

He craves it. He craves the connection so tight, so fierce that there is no room, physical or mental, for anyone else. He craves to not be the one who forges the connection, but to be the one on its receiving end. He’d been frank about that from the start, that I needed not worry about hurting him, and that he was as prone, as ready to succumb to the desires of his flesh, pathetic or selfish or insane as they might be.

And that’s how I caught a glimpse of Potter’s Ginny, fierce, carefree and strong, who Potter had chosen to carve his own alcove with in a world that’d treated him as public property. A year into our relationship and on her birthday, and Potter told me his first time as the receiver.

They were not married yet. He had been an Auror for three years and she was with the Harpies. They’d considered switching places in bed but never put it in action. Then one day, he had a successful mission and she, a victorious meet. They made it back to their flat at the same time, still in their uniforms and before they even said Hello, she Accio'ed everything and took him there at the fireplace.

As she helped him up – it did hurt – she laughed and offered her one explanation, which was that Potter looked delectably fuckable in his issue and with a dab of Floo powder on his crinkly nose. To prove her point, she Summoned a camera and took a picture of them together, in a huddled heap on the floor and their uniforms haphazardly thrown on.

That night, James was conceived.

They skipped the wedding ceremony. The media frenzy, even in imaginary form, annoyed him, and Ginny was showing. But the pair of uniforms Potter still has in his home. Ginny called them their wedding gowns. Both reported to their teams that their uniform had suffered irreversible damage and required replacements. That photo, which Potter called his wedding photo, remained on the mantle.

I asked to see the gowns. Potter nodded and led me upstairs. As he spelled open the protector, the scent of violence, of passion mingled with the attic’s sunshine. No two pieces of dragonhide smelled the same, but the years together had married those two and made them one. The Auror robe was still the same burgundy red, so, too, was the blood smear on its rank stripes. The gold talon on the Harpies Chaser suit still shimmered, an eagle’s like the head of griffins.

Red and gold. They were meant to be together.

As I prepared my descent, a blade of grass fell from the heel of the Chaser boot onto the floor. It was still supple, its green vivid against the silver protector, as if life had not deserted it years ago. Potter picked it up with one hand, his other caught me at my wrist on the top flight of the stairs. But he did look at me; for minutes all he did was stare at the grass. “Thanks Gin,” he finally whispered, and with a modified binding charm, braided the blade in my hair and claimed it a good look on me, chuckling.

Meanwhile, the small crease—the crinkle—on his nose had turned red. I touched it again, as I’d had in the Land of Dust and Scrolls.

It melted into salt water in his eyes.

 

 

*

About Astoria, I managed to tell Potter in three simple words.

She loved me.

  
  
  


 

 

###  _~ Epilogue (A Kitchen Fire Later) ~_

 

I‘ve seen the whittled rocks, the waterfall, and the seedling that has grown into the sweetest apple tree. This story of mine will end, and another will start, with them.

The Epilogue was requested by the network. It would give flexibility in timing, said the owl. I suppose the network is a lesser fan of love when they score commercials, or God forbid, breaking news of the True Saviour’s and his former criminal boyfriend’s dinner date in St Mungo’s Tea Room ( _“He got beef cottage pie and he got a Scottish fish pie! Is there a rift in their fragile relationship?!”_ ). The Epilogue is to offer a real life tidbit of the romance, a trivia. For example, a lovely moment between The Rebel, The Princess, and the tiny Rebel Princesses they have for spawns with manners like their father and attitude like their mother. It is lovely because neither the hero nor the heroine has run off with the court jester, who smells better and is lower maintenance.

Spelling _Aguamenti_ into the oven is an extra real life tidbit I didn’t plan.

 

 

*

Maybe it’s the tears Andromeda shed on the apples Scorpius and I had brought her, maybe it’s the blessing from that blade of grass, but Potter and I have found our peace in the Malfoy orchards.

Once I thought the war had cured me of wanting forever, the same want that makes sure that, to this day, I can count every wrinkle of my great-great-great grandfather, and his great-great-great grandfather in the Malfoy crypt. But that blade of grass has made me see something else – that my great-great-great grandfather’s hand was holding his wife’s, and his great-great-great grandfather’s, his wife’s. And of course, my father’s hand is linked with my mother’s. Both wills specified that, and one day, centuries later, someone would find them just the same way I’d laid them to rest. I hope they will, too, find in the next coffin, with my name already carved on it from the day I was born, with the blade of grass, dried but still coiled with my hair I’d cut off together that evening.

Potter and my peace came, predictably, from one of our fights. His day had started early, with a meeting with St Mungo's higher-ups, who he loathed, as the Head of VSP Clinical Research. The exhaustion made worse his Unspeakable talking problem and he said something cutting about my weekly visit to the crypt. I shot back, something a million times worse than cutting, then his hands were on my collar and then, _pop_ , and we were in a heap in the orchard.

"Was going to throw you in the crypt and lock the door", he confessed.

"Be glad we’re in one piece," I said, wanted to sit up, only realising then that somehow, Potter had managed to Apparate with us his coffee cup and saucer, which were balanced perfectly on my knee. It would be the end of my trousers if I budged.

I pointed at my problem. Potter laughed. I followed suit and that was the end of that fight. It was summer and the late evening sky was glorious, gold and pink with clouds. We lay down together, pillowed our heads on our arms, and watched.

“Wanna know how my day was?” he asked me, after some time.

I shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Still angry?”

No. But I shrugged.

He saw through me and glanced at his wristwatch. “Still early for sex.” He feigned a frown, his mouth tugged with a half-smile. Then he guided my head to rest on his chest, against his chin.

“Come in.”

“Mmm?” I asked.

“Legilimens. Try it on me. See if you can see my day.”

I looked at him.

It was his turn to shrug. “Worth a try.”

“That’s what Pensieves are for.”

He waved an arm towards the manor house. “Too far. I’m tired.”

I mumbled _sloth_ and instantly proved that I was no better in that regard, for I’d nudged and made myself comfortable on his chest again. I’d never used Legilimens on him. He had been an Auror, a profession known to produce skilled Occlumens. Occlumency was a shield, and what warrior worth his salt rode without one? And once that guard was formed, there was no going back.

So I spelled, at half power, expecting the backlash, a wild oscillation that would wedge my own mind open and spill its contents.

It didn’t happen. In fact, so little happened that I thought my spell had failed. I’d been in the minds of many. Most were like the Records room in St Mungo's, filled with bad air and rambling keepsakes. My father’s, which acted as my training ground during the winter hols of my fifth year, felt like an ancient study, cramped and stacked to the ceiling with locked cases and books; once my feet were in, I’d frantically climb up and down the rickety stairs, trying to expose that morsel of a picture hidden with a cursed goblet, or clipped in the first edition of _Magick Moste Evile_.

But in Potter’s mind, I wasn’t even sure where to look. I only realised my presence within with the trees missing. A sky still stretched over my head, which could be the canvas of a sunset but colours and time meant so little when the air was so clear and silver crisp. I thought there was grass under me too, soft, a little damp, and green. I stretched and my muscles jumped with life, my lung filled with joy. My mind supplied that I had a mission, that I was supposed to see things like meetings and patients, but in the vastness, the comfort… I lost my will to hunt. I lay down and felt fingers acknowledge me, tracing my jawline, playing with my hair. I took a deep breath and smelled apples, bright, tart and well worth the wait like the best of Malfoy’s creations, and just a hint of coffee…

It would be the first of many times I found myself there. In peace. In love. When I told Potter what I saw, he feigned disappointment. So much for having a popular writer ghost-write his reports, he said. But he was grinning, and added that I now had proof that there was nothing but air between his ears.

Who was I to argue that? I smiled, and amidst this silver air and its golden sun, the green grass and red apple trees, I found the key to my home lost so long ago.

 

 

 

~ The End ~


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